What with dorm life and new friends and new abilities that were not available before, many people (according to Facebook statuses) have been comparing themselves to Harry Potter. So that got me thinking.
Why didn’t anybody just bring in a ballpoint pen or a Nintendo to Hogwarts and freak everybody out? All anyone is ever using are quills with ink and crap. Who needs that? Just bringing a pack of Bics will make your bag lighter. Just because they can do magic shouldn’t mean they need to haul ink pots around. And screw scrolls. Why not notebooks and binders? And has anyone invented the typewriter yet?
Okay. Hogwarts has no electricity and batteries with infinite battery life probably violate some sort of muggle artifacts interference legislation. But I don’t think anyone thought to ban hand-cranked generators or solar panels. Just charge up a stack of car batteries on a sunny day? Unfeasible? Not if all the equipment can fit in an enchanted duffel bag.
And how do they mow lawns and such without internal combustion engines? Unless they can somehow magic the grass to halt mitotic cell division… ? Well that makes the other stuff look easy. If they can affect biological processes, why not affect individual electrons or other subatomic particles and induce electricity?
Join me next week for a brainstorming of the economy of Middle Earth.
about the grass, perhaps they’ve removed the intercalary meristem in the grass. oh, or maybe there’s magical creatures chillin around, eatin’ the grass.
Well. I was confounded with it too when I read it. Harry’s 11th birthday lands on 1991. And SNES was popular from 1990 to 1993. So technically, we should see SNES becoming very popular with kids all over. And throughout his last years we should have seen the Nintendo 64 work its wonders.
There were cars. So I am assuming that they had lawnmowers. As for Hogwarts, they probably had either a barrack full of enchanted garden gnomes or magically enchanted grass roots that didn’t grow beyond a certain point.
It’s more like there is no need for muggle forms of energy supply in Hogwarts. They had all the magical power everywhere to help them out for whatever they had to do.
They kept wearing muggle clothes though, It’s not like they were totally immune to our culture. I’m sure they could have just made it so that no power was required to operate the whatever.
In the movies, yes. But not in the book. They wore robes and house-matching clothes.
the robes in the book were mostly implied and only occasionally mentioned. The street clothes of the most recent movies were a result of a new director and a reallocated budget. (You’d be surprised how expensive it is to make robes for Daniel Radcliffe, especially when fangirls break into his trailer every night and steal them.)